Of cockroaches & credibility🪳
India's Cockroach Janta Party has 22 million Instagram followers, no formal ideology, and many lessons for communicators paying attention to the power of frustrated youth.
Who’s afraid of cockroaches? Well, me for one, thanks to a childhood spent in Hong Kong, a city that strikes fear into all right-thinking cockroach sceptics. But I may have to make my peace with the reviled insect, thanks to its emergence as the unlikely mascot of an explosive digital movement in India, which reflects how political expression is being reshaped in the Gen Z era.
The idea began as a reactive meme — after India’s chief justice Surya Kant compared unemployed young people to cockroaches and parasites in their drift towards journalism and activism. Enter the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), the brainchild of Boston University student Abhijeet Dipke, named as a parody of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Rather than positioning itself as a formal political party, the CJP’s membership criteria instead includes being unemployed, lazy, chronically online and having "the ability to rant professionally". In classic meme fashion, owning the insult has struck a significant chord, attracting more than 22m Instagram followers, not only well ahead of both the BJP and Congress, but also making the CJP one of the fastest-growing and biggest political accounts ever to grace the social platform.
